Dec. 20, 2017

Whether you’re voting in an election or buying a car, you need to do your homework to ensure you make the right choice. A wrong decision could have a lasting impact. This means taking input from a variety of sources and making an informed, educated decision. While of course you shouldn’t only listen to the claims of the candidate or the auto manufacturer, you should also bear in mind that their competitors may sometimes distort the truth in order to move you away from your preferred choice.

The same approach is true for organizations looking to implement an enterprise software solution. While vendors and competitors have the right to have to state their own opinions and perspectives (both on the products themselves and broader industry issues), there can often be a considerable amount of competitive misinformation in the market. If left unaddressed, this could result in a buyer making a decision that isn’t in the best interest of their company.

To ensure you don’t fall victim to these false assumptions, here are three of the most common misconceptions that we’ve heard out in the field, and what the actual answer is:

“Chrome River doesn’t offer an end-to-end solution”

We’re proud that we have created what many of our customers say is the best and easiest-to-use expense management software in the market. By focusing on expense and invoice management, we can ensure that we create a best-in-class system, and don’t dilute our efforts on other areas.

In addition to designing a system which is straightforward for end-users, we also wanted to ensure that CIOs, finance leaders and corporate travel teams can use their preferred travel booking solution. As a result, our best-of-breed solution integrates easily into the most popular systems in use, including Sabre/GetThere, Amadeus/cytric, Egencia, and Deem. We also take data feeds from hundreds of TMCs worldwide, so you can get simple, end-to-end travel booking and expense reporting. The difference is that, instead of being stuck with a single vendor, you are able to choose the best provider for each part to suit your organization’s specific requirements.

“Chrome River doesn’t integrate well with SAP”

We do. And, as much as we’d like to say that we’re special because of this, we’re really not. SAP openly talks about its open ecosystem, and a large number of software vendors – even those that compete directly with SAP’s own products – integrate into the SAP environment. Just because SAP has its own expense management solution doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work with Chrome River. In fact, some of our largest customers are SAP users, and data flows smoothly between the different systems.

And while we’re on the subject, we also integrate just as well into a variety of other ERP systems, including Oracle, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Ellucian and Banner, to name just a few.

“Chrome River doesn’t have offline capabilities”

Just because Chrome River delivers its solution via a web app doesn’t mean that you can’t submit or approve expenses if you’re offline. You can do both.

To submit an expense, simply take a photo of a receipt, open your mobile phone’s email app, attach the picture and hit send. As soon as you are back on the mobile network, we will receive your images, extract the data with our market-leading OCR capabilities and you’ll have expense items ready in seconds. If you’re on a plane, they will probably be ready to submit before you even get your bags.

You can also approve others’ expenses just as easily. As soon as your direct reports submit their expenses, an email containing the line items and receipts is sent to you. This can then be approved with a single click from within your mobile phone’s email application, and if you need to review receipts before doing so, you simply open the image files.

Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care. Sally Abella, Director of Corporate Travel Harman International

We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic.
Ben Zastrow Zelle